


Green Boils and Genetics Research

by Enigmaris



Series: Summoned King AU [8]
Category: Danny Phantom, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Genetics, Helen Cho is smart, Most researchers I met don't, Mystery, Research, Visiting a Doctor, Vlad's secret isn't as safe as he thought, certain it will come in handy one day, she also doesn't delete anything off her computer, they just keep decades old pdfs in their computers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:54:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27235327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enigmaris/pseuds/Enigmaris
Summary: Helen Cho is here, both to look over Danny and met Thor. But Danny's blood samples look strangely familiar and she happens to have a decade old medical paper stored on her computer that might just lead to a bigger mystery than she or Tony ever expected.Ectober Day 3 Prompt: Rewind/Cold Case
Series: Summoned King AU [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1970470
Comments: 94
Kudos: 904





	Green Boils and Genetics Research

**Author's Note:**

> This one is another Vlad chapter. Poor guy just can't keep his secret identity secret.

Helen Cho had not been entirely interested in coming to Avengers Tower with such short notice. Her work on the cradle was at a delicate stage and really, she did not need Tony’s money.

Tony mentioned he needed her expertise to look at a young man who had had his genes mutated from a lab accident

Which was tempting certainly, but not enough.

Then he mentioned Thor would be there and she’d gotten on the plane. She’d sent an email to her research team and all of the women in it had messaged her back and told her good luck. Whether that was for her new patient or for meeting Thor, well that was between her and them. When she got to New York, she was led to Avengers tower to be introduced to Danny Fenton, a young man from Amity Park, Illinois who had been in an accident four years prior.

Apparently, he hadn’t seen a single medical professional since the lab accident due to fear of being turned into an experiment.

So, Helen would be the first to get a look at his new, and unique, DNA.

Danny was 18 years old, based on his height, he should weigh around 120 to 150 pounds. Especially since he was on the skinny side. When she had him stand on the scale though, she found he weighed much, much less. He seemed surprised by this as well, asking if that was bad.

“Could be. Your situation is unique, Mr. Fenton.” She said writing down Danny’s 85-pound weight down onto her chart. “But based on your age and height you should weigh twice that.”

“Oh.”

She listened to his lungs, looked at some x-rays, and then took blood and cheek swab samples. Which is where things started to get interesting.

Interesting as in, something was pinging in the back of her mind.

Of course, she should, rightly, have never seen anything like this before. A strange green substance had bonded itself to Danny’s DNA. It had infiltrated his cells, his bones, even the interstitial space between the cells was probably a bit contaminated with it. The substance, when she got a good look at it, was strangely…light. Far less dense than she expected. And since it seemed to have replaced a large amount of material in the boy’s body, it explained why he weighed so little. Even his bones were likely much lighter than they would be normally.

All of it was strange, but it was clear the boy wasn’t unhealthy. He healed quickly and had a good appetite. He reported no pain or strange symptoms.

Still, looking at the samples made something in her brain itch.

It was as if she’d seen it _before_.

Impossible of course.

Still, the closer she looked the greater the itch grew. There was something about the look of the cheek swab samples that made her feel like she was an idiot for not remembering where she’d seen it before. She never liked feeling stupid, she wasn’t one of the world’s top medical researchers for nothing. She leaned back in her chair with a sigh. Danny had left her about thirty minutes before, thanking her for looking him over and promising to answer any questions she had once she finished her initial study. Tony had explained that the lab accident had given Danny the ability to transform into something else, and when she’d heard that she said she wanted to look at his human form first and get some first impressions before moving forward with the next step.

But something about this first impression felt like a rewind in her brain. Like she’d known this sort of condition before and she just needed to turn back the clock and remember it.

So that’s what she did. Mentally she recounted every medical case she’d looked at or studied, at least the ones she could recall, starting with the most recent and moving backwards. The memories got a bit foggier the further back she went, but still nothing was at all similar to Danny’s condition. She thought all the way back to medical school in an attempt to put the itch in her brain to rest. She almost got the point of giving up and messaging Tony that he owed her an introduction to Thor already when it hit her.

The Cold Cases.

Oh, it must have been nearly 20 years ago now, when she was a young 20 something studying medical papers about strange conditions and learning to fall in love with genetics for the first time. She and her study cohort had taken to looking for the weirdest documented medical cases they could find and bringing them to share with the group over beers and pizza. They called them medical cold cases, thinking themselves something like medical detectives trying to figure out what caused these strange conditions. Those evenings had been the highlight of her Friday nights some months during the grind that was medical school.

“Holy shit.” She said, grabbing at her white messenger back and pulling open the flap.

“Are you okay, Doctor Cho?”

“Fine. Just fine Jarvis. I just remembered something. I need to go look at some old files, it might help with my study of Danny.”

“Of course, let me know if you need anything.”

She made an agreeing noise and pulled out her thin Stark laptop, a gift from Tony back when he’d been trying to butter her up and convince her to leave her position and join him at Stark Industries. She loved the laptop and had declined the offer. She opened up the computer and quickly typed out her password, then she went into her files folder. Back about 10 years ago when it was clear that going digital was the way forward, she’d gotten a grad student to go through her paper files and scan everything and make the scans into pdfs for her to keep. She started going deeper and deeper into her storage system wondering if perhaps, somehow, the scans of the papers she’d saved from medical school had been kept along with the rest.

It wasn’t like she deleted anything anyway.

It took thirty minutes of searching until she found the right folder, it had been labeled ‘Fun Times with Josh’, which was the name of the poor grad student in question, and it seemed to have all the scanned papers in it. She rifled through it until she found the one she wanted.

“Bingo.” She said as she clicked on the pdf.

_‘Green Boils: A Unique Case of Radioactive Contamination’_

She looked up the authors of the paper and then quickly googled its title and author name, frowning when she couldn’t find a single copy of the paper online, something that had been published in a reputable journal nearly 24 years ago.

“Maybe it hasn’t been digitized yet?” She muttered to herself, unaware that it had indeed been digitized and then ruthlessly deleted by a vampiric ghost a decade prior, destroying all evidence of its existence both in electronic and physical form. All evidence except for the copy on her laptop of course. “Oh well. Guess I’ll just have to read the old scans.”

She read through the images, craning her neck and squinting her eyes to get through the parts where the scan hadn’t been perfect, and the words were smudged or shadowed. It took her a while to look through it, but sure enough, the black and white images of cell samples and blood samples were a near perfect match of what she’d taken from Danny. An unnamed male patient had been exposed to a green radioactive substance in high quantities on his face during a college experiment gone wrong, resulting in a long term hospitalization. He’d been in extreme pain and had suffered from painful boils all over the irradiated area.

The paper concluded that there seemed to be no cure for the boils, and that traditional pain management methods were ineffective. She winced at the very idea of having huge green boils all over her face that never went away and _hurt_.

Still, why did Danny have the same blood samples as a man who’d been in an accident 24 years ago? Why wasn’t Danny showing similar symptoms as this man?

Did the unnamed male patient also have an alternate form?

Her mind buzzed with questions and she found herself asking Jarvis if he’d ask Tony if he wouldn’t mind coming down to the med bay for a talk. Five minutes later the billionaire waltzed into the area with a concerned look on his face.

“Something up with Danny?”

“I think he’s fine. At least I hope he is. I’m sorry, but his samples reminded me of another medical case from 24 years ago.”

“Seriously?”

“See for yourself.”

Tony grimaced at the scanned images but did indeed slide a chair over and start reading through the paper on her computer. Then when he finished his quick read through, he looked at the samples she had on the microscope and whistled.

“Damn, that’s a near perfect match.”

“I know. It’s strange. This patient had so many painful symptoms that Danny never did, at least if what he told me is true. If he did, he would have had to be hospitalized for the pain at least. Plus, this paper implies concern that the boils were infectious. Even a small town doctor would have had the same concern.”

“You’re worried.”

“What if he starts getting these boils later in life?” She pushed. “They’d debilitate him.”

Tony frowned and then looked back at the paper.

“Any idea who this patient was?”

“Medical papers don’t show revealing information about subjects, it’s illegal.”

“Yeah that’s not gonna be a problem. Jarvis let’s start searching.”

Before she could protest the infringement on someone’s privacy, Tony was already listing out a series of search requirements for Jarvis to use. The AI only took moments to look up the authors of the papers to see which hospital they worked at during the time of publication, and then from there to look for newspaper articles from the time period and era that mention some sort of lab accident.

He got a hit within fifteen minutes, a small little clipping in a university newspaper mentioning an explosion in one of the chemistry labs that involved three people.

Their names?

Jack Fenton, Maddie Smith, and Vlad Masters.

“Fenton?” She asked. “Like Danny Fenton?”

“His mom’s name is Maddie.” Tony told her, looking at the third name with something like but not quite fear in his brown eyes.

“Tony?”

“You know. I’ve always wondered how he got so rich so quickly.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Helen, send that file to me, will you? And don’t tell anyone about this. It’s important.”

“I can do that. Do you still want me to keep studying Danny’s samples?”

“Please. Seriously you’d be a total life saver. And let me know when you’re done. I’ll take you upstairs to meet the team. Thor’s wearing a short sleeve shirt today.” He finished with a teasing glint in his eyes.

She slapped him on the arm and told him to get going before she got a scalpel or something, Tony laughed and hopped away. Helen sent Tony a copy of the pdf and then got back to work on Danny’s samples.

Whoever Vlad Masters was, she hoped he’d figured out the boil issue at least.


End file.
